feminine-genius

A battle front in the real war on women

The feminists must be distracted; otherwise they would be outraged by the abuse of Uzbek women, who are being sterilised against their will. These poor women are not even aware of that government's monthly quotas which are assigned to each Ob-Gyn, and carried out during childbirth.

And look at the health risks that women are unnecessarily subject to for this govt. program:

The forced sterilizations may even be on the rise. Antelava’s medical sources reported a dramatic increase in Caesarean section births in the last two years, which provide surgeons with an easy opportunity to sterilize women.

“Rules on Caesareans used to be very strict, but now I believe 80% of women give birth through C-sections. This makes it very easy to perform a sterilisation and tie the fallopian tubes,” a chief surgeon at a hospital near Tashkent said.

“The mark of a totalitarian government is the use of secretive programs, violence and force to manipulate the population. This effort to forcibly sterilize women without their knowledge is an egregious affront to human rights and a crime against humanity,” said Father Peter West, vice president for missions at Human Life International, in response to the story. “Civil and political leaders in Uzbekistan and other nations, including President Obama, need to strongly and very publicly condemn these attacks on the women of Uzbekistan and pressure government officials to bring an end to this human rights crisis.”

Obama and the feminists always seem to be distracted by their own red herrings. 80% of Uzbek babies are delivered by Caesarian so that the government can interfere with their fertility? To women who are probably strong, healthy, and otherwise need no such interventions? In settings where health care may be substandard and risky?

Leave it to the Church to point out real injustices against women--and to work for the good.

The "work-life balance" myth

Suzanne Venker has posted a very good piece at NRO about why careers will naturally be negatively impacted by decisions that prioritise family. It's the nature of reality.

What we never talk about is where this feminist utopia [of balancing work and family] leaves employers. Employers can not — they must not — be responsible for helping parents manage their family lives. If employers can afford to offer part-time employment, fine. If they can afford to allow their employees to take off an endless string of days and still make money in the meantime, more power to ’em. But come on: such businesses are few and far between. Employers are in business to make money. They may be sympathetic to the The Problem, but they cannot solve it.

This piece is similar to what I found in her new book, The Flipside of Feminism. While I promised a review, I'm not usually in the habit of doing negative reviews (at least not for the "good guys"). The book was good -- as far as it went. It was hard-hitting, enjoyable and completely conservative, but also entirely secular. There was a thin veil of Protestant virtue about it, but that veil hasn't sufficed to keep the country on track thus far, and it wasn't enough to recommend the book (though as a gift to non-religious recovering feminists, it would be great).

We know how America is supposed to work, and we know what rules should govern the workplace. All of that was covered very well, but Catholics know that there's more to life than a secular work-life dichotomy, and that secular paradigm never attempts to factor in vocation, a family wage, the hidden cost of vice, and the priorities that faith demands, etc. Apart from realigning the public sphere along Godly principles (which isn't going to happen any time soon) we will have to settle for these secular guidelines -- while providing a witness for something transcendent in our own lives. A challenge, indeed, but this wasn't the book to help with that quest.

Food or faith?

As you watch this video, consider her dress (which is lovely!) and the fact that she didn't coordinate with the Feminine Genius blog about her wardrobe. Thus we have a clash of colours (at least in my myopic view) that pits the purple against the orange. It is illustrative of the philosophical impasse she discovered:

While "in taste there can be no dispute" (Aquinas) if we replace colours with world-view, we see clearly that conscience stands a good chance of being trampled. If the mainstream mandates that "everyone's right!" then Christianity must be excised from the public discussion -- for truth is vastly different than mere matters of taste.

These traps are being laid in the medical community, social services of all kinds, and public servants everywhere, who will be called to toe the line on diversity and tolerance. So medical procedures, school curricula, end of life issues, family crises and distribution of government dollars are quickly becoming entrenched with a worldview patently incompatible with our faith. The weeding process is well underway, has her course directors show. Now comes our opportunity to choose Christ or accomodate evil. Paycheck optional.

Charity by the numbers

Little Jayden didn't receive medical care because he was born two days too early, according to medical guidelines in Britain.

A midwife said he was breathing and had a strong heartbeat, and described him as a "little fighter".

I kept asking for the doctors but the midwife said, "They won't come and help, sweetie. Make the best of the time you have with him".'

She cuddled her child and took precious photos of him, but he died in her arms less than two hours after his birth.

He may or may not have survived, but that is not the point. It seems that these rules are in keeping with the calculated views of the [monetary] value of human life and the arbitrary assignment of personhood through abortion laws. The death of a child is intensely hard to take, but the cruel, impersonal injustices surrounding this child's death only exacerbates the suffering.

Violence against women

Violence against women is a sad reality of every day life in most areas of the world. There are many contributing factors, which combine the greater physical strength of most men with cultural constructs that allow women no recourse -- but the press to protect women doesn't include the greatest violent act of all: abortion. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) tries to short-circuit the outcome with heavy penalties for those accused of hurting women while ignoring the sexual predators who count on easy access to women borne of a contraceptive mentality.

Sadly, Georgetown University's Law Center and the National Organisation for Women's former legal arm, now called "Legal Momentum" are joining forces to honour VP Joe Biden who has been the Senate sponsor or VAWA legislation. It's bad on every level:

• Joe Biden is a Catholic who supports abortion;
• NOW is one of the largest abortion promotors in the country; and
• VAWA falls grievously short of understanding the dynamics that lead to abuse of women.

That a Catholic institution is the setting for this tragic event is one more scandal in a year of scandals.

UPDATE: Irony alert! Pro-abortion Biden included in his remarks this statement:

You know there is no excuse for violence against a women or child. There is no excuse.

I guess that's why "choicers" don't like the graphic photos of aborted foetal remains -- it undermines their "safe and legal" platitudes with something that looks almost, well, violent. Jesus, mercy!

Who's your daddy?

We are aware that date rape has odd rules. We are aware that promiscuity is rampant. We are aware that alcohol leads to extremely poor choices (if they can even be called "choices" when the brain has been lubricated thusly). And yet the convoluted argument in this article has me bewildered. First, the ground rules as they stand Down Under:

A woman meets a man in a bar or at a party. She likes the man. He likes the woman. She may not normally be a sex on the first night kind of girl. But they have a number of drinks. Fuelled by alcohol, they put aside their inhibitions. The woman goes home with the man. She says yes to sex. In the morning, the man makes it clear it was a one-night stand. The woman is deeply offended and regrets her drunken decision. She claims rape. Under new rape laws introduced in NSW this year, that man is likely to be convicted as a rapist. He is likely to go to prison.

The article refers to this legal posture as "post-coital regret," and it has teeth. And yet Ms. Albrechtsen, who writes this piece for the Austrialian is incensed at the attempt to protect women.

[T]he fact that the woman who says "yes" to sex is drunk is highly relevant: it may vitiate her consent. But the man's intoxication must be ignored when working out whether he had "reasonable grounds" for believing consent was given. It is a curious law that says alcohol only affects the cognitive abilities of women.

These new rape laws degrade women. They treat them as helpless victims, stripping them of the power to make decisions about sex after consuming alcohol. Down a few too many Bacardi Breezers, and the law says you are no longer responsible for your actions. Is this really the message we want to send to young women?

One might think that, for the sake of equality, the writer is upset that women are off the hook while men aren't (which would be a valid concern) but rather she says that sex is naturally part of a night of carousing, and men shouldn't have to pay for that. Honestly, I'm not sure of her point, but it comes nothing close to saying that everyone should be more moderate with alcohol. Bottom line: it seems that this effort to cater to women is one more example of the government in the bedroom, which is intolerable.

Feminists are to blame for this "cat and mouse" game and, as usual, the men pay. But what if this made all men back off casual sex and made them less apt to take advantage? For centuries, many a man who courted a girl (who gladly encouraged him) had to pay when her father found out. It was a healthy form of deterrence that everyone know was part of the landscape.

In this fatherless world, even feminists are reaching out for authoritative protection. Crazy, perhaps misguided, but understandable in the end.

Trickle-down effect

For those who follow the effects of Title IX, which has radically realigned college sports so that there is an equal distribution of male/female athletes (no matter the inclinations of the student bodies), hang onto your foam fingers. The legislation will now apply to high schools, affecting younger participants, often dismantling entire legacies so that parity will be maintained.

At the center of the pro-quota activists’ marching orders for Congress today is something called the “High School Sports Information Collection Act.” It’s modeled after the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA), which for a dozen years has forced colleges and universities to annually report their athletic participation and expenses — broken down by sex — to the feds. The EADA was meant to be, and is, a one-stop-shopping list for trial lawyers and activist groups looking for schools to sue for failing to meet the Title IX quota. Now, courtesy of Senators Olympia Snowe and Patty Murray, they are about to have the same litigation hit list of high schools.

There comes a time when equality of opportunity is morphed into equality of outcome, and freedom ceases to be at the heart of the measure. Draconian steps are now in place to make sure fewer boys can continue the sport they enjoy so that girls will be encouraged to get moving -- at something, for the sake of quotas.

Interestingly, it doesn't work because of [gasp!] healthy differences between boys and girls that manifest themselves early.

Federal fiat, it turns out, can provide for the additional sports for girls, but it can’t make them come out and play. When gender bean counters told Martin County high schools that they “didn’t have enough” girls playing junior varsity sports, the county instituted a full court press to lure more freshman and JV female athletes. But response was so poor that one school had to cancel plans for girls’ varsity soccer, another couldn’t get enough players for JV basketball. At Martin County High School, the athletic director had trouble getting four girls out of a female student body of over 800 to come out for the new bowling team.

The reason high schools are having trouble finding as many girls to play sports as there are boys clamoring to take the field is apparent to anyone who takes the time to look: Girls have more varied extracurricular interests than boys. Girls out-participate boys in every extracurricular activity — band, drama, debate, student government — every one, that is, except for sports. The extracurricular gender gap so favors girls that the Independent Women’s Forum calculated that if the government were suddenly to require the same gender quota for participation in other extracurricular activities that it does in sports, 36 percent of female choir members, 25 percent of female orchestra members, and 33 percent of female debaters would have to be eliminated.

Boys run a greater risk of gangs, addictions to video games, drugs and alcohol, or other dangerous behaviours, and often struggle more with academics than girls do. They often turn to sports as a diversion, and outlet for excess energy, for bonding and for proving themselves physically. Now feminists are pulling the rug out from underneath them, and undermining girls in the process. Instead of allowing the girls to enjoy themselves with 4-H, Honour Society, or the latest play, gender-gurus are dragging them kicking and screaming onto the new bowling team to prove a sorry point.

Motherly hearts are intuitive and wise. Unfortunately, with the rejection of motherhood in its myriad forms, feminists are leaving some of the most critical skills behind in a shabby effort to be at best second-class men. Pity.

Dark side of the ERA

Technology has taken the world past the traditional categories, it would seem. Rather than scratching our heads and thinking that perhaps it's problemmatic, we just change the categories and carry on with our day.

A surrogate mother who has no genetic connection to the baby she is carrying does not have to be listed as the mother on a birth certificate, Maryland's highest court ruled Wednesday.

The case arose from twins born in the Washington suburbs in 2001. The woman who carried the twins for a father used an egg donor and had no genetic relationship to them. Both she and the father did not want her listed as the mother.

"Maryland's breaking ground here," said Dorrance Dickens, a Washington lawyer who argued the case for the father and the surrogate mother. Though judges routinely allow blank spaces for mothers on birth certificates in surrogate cases, Dickens said Maryland's court is the first to use a state Equal Rights Amendment to make the decision. In a 56-page decision, the majority argued that a man who can prove he has no genetic relationship to a child can be ruled not to be its father, so a woman should have the same ability.

"The methods by which people can produce children have changed," Chief Justice Robert Bell wrote in the decision. "... The paternity statute, clearly, did not contemplate the many potential legal issues arising from these new technologies, issues that will continue to arise unless the laws are rewritten or construed in light of these new technologies."

Aren't we clever! Methods change, and the law will just have to keep up. This justification carries tremendous portents within it:

"The majority, in essence, holds that if you do not intend to be the mother, you should not be responsible as a mother," Cathell wrote. "There are probably tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of fathers (and certainly mothers as well) who did not intend to be parents at the time of the actions that led to conception, who have been judicially determined to be responsible for the support of the child they did not intend to conceive."

Intention. That's a dangerous precedent, assuming that most men now seeking intimacy with women don't intend to be fathers. In fact, even many mothers are caught by "surprise." Could it be that all "accidents" will be without either parent on birth certificates of the future? Good thing God wants to father us; and Holy Mother Church extends her loving embrace as well. That's the adoption we count on!

A sentence from the dissenting opinion carries the money quote:

Not all judges agreed. In a dissent, Judge Dale Cathell said the father had the twins "manufactured" and then didn't want them to be listed as having a mother.

The children involved in such cases are chattel, products, consumer items -- customised, but merchandise all the same. This is at the heart of the Church's teaching about reproductive technologies. The child has rights -- and a basic right is to be created in a dignified way, as the result of a commited conjugal act. Anything short of that is abuse. It can be overcome in hard cases with grace and forgiveness (i.e. rape, or being born outside a committed union) but to have deliberately sought abusive conditions as the preferred setting is unconscionable.

What will be said?

This looks intriguing:

VATICAN CITY, JAN 13, 2007 (VIS) - On February 27, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Holy See permanent observer to the United Nations in New York, together with the Path to Peace Foundation and the Vincentian Center for Church and Society of St. John's University in New York, will host an event within the framework of a meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, entitled "The Human Dignity of Women in Contemporary Society: Addressing Violence against Women."

According to a communique made public today, the event "will identify the key contemporary social economic and legal issues that violence has upon women; discuss these issues through the prism of the dignity of the human person; describe current best practices and the applied ethics approach to the issue of violence and its prevention; and provide a forum for the exchange of experience across nations and enhanced communication among panelists and participants."

The meeting, which will be moderated by Marilyn Martone, associate professor of theology at St. John's University, will consider such questions as: Domestic Violence: Service and Policy Issues; Sexual Exploitation of Women and Girls: Trafficking, Prostitution and Weapons of War; and Gender-Based Violence: International Human Rights and Family Reunification Policy.

The question is whether there can be an honest exchange, or whether it will be bureaucratic gobbledygook. This is a critical topic for women worldwide, so we can only pray that forthrightness prevails.

"Thrives" may be stretching it

Blazing trails and forging new paths is exciting.

A woman in London, Ont., wants the Ontario Court of Appeal to recognize her as the third parent of a boy she's raising with her lesbian partner.

The application, if allowed, would be believed to mark the first time in Canada a child would legally have more than two parents, and would fundamentally change the definition of the word "family."

The biological father and mother and her female partner must remain anonymous because of a court ruling protecting their identities.

"The family has evolved over the years in a way that the law should recognize the reality of this little boy," said the father's lawyer, Alfred Mamo, "his reality being that he's got two mothers and a father with whom he thrives. They all want this for their son."

Perhaps we could look in on this "family" in about ten years to see how he's thriving. Some children suffer unforseen tragedies. Others have it deliberately foisted on them because the adults in their lives cannot see anyone other than themselves. "His reality" is that he's surrounded by selfish people, and he's a way cool pawn through which they can all affirm their lifestyle choices. Yippee.